Over the last few days it has come to light that there is another significant tobacco price rise on the horizon. Tobacco prices in the United States are expected to go up within the next month or two. Tobacco users can expect to see prices per pack go up by around 7 cents per pack. On the surface it doesn’t seem to be that much, but it all adds up over the days and weeks.

With this news I’d say that it was the ideal time to start looking for an alternative, if you don’t intend to stop smoking. And I’m sure you know what I’m going to recommend.

E cigarettes seem to be quite expensive when you first look at them, some E cigarette starter kits can cost $100 or more, but because of how cheap the nicotine cartridges for them are, this initial outlay is quickly returned to the user. In general a nicotine cartridge gives you the same smoking time as a pack of cigarettes, and these will cost you less than $2 each. Compare that to spending $8-$10 for a pack of tobacco smokes, you can start to see the appeal of these devices.

Which to buy?

When you shop for an electronic cigarette you may be overwhelmed by the selection on offer these days. Thankfully though choosing what brand to go for isn’t too hard, the majority of cheap brands can be discounted instantly, along with the E cigarettes you find for sale at your local mall. Concentrate on the bigger players, they spend huge amounts of money researching their product and are forever improving them. V2 Cigs, Green Smoke and South Beach Smoke are the three main brands to look at, you can read my reviews of them on this site (just look at the right hand side of the page for links). Choosing between these devices might be a little bit harder as they are all very good, but I’ll tell you this, whatever device you go for, you wont be disappointed and you shouldn’t feel the urge to start using tobacco again.

If you have any questions please leave them in the comments box below and I’ll happily answer them.

It has been about 7 months since I last wrote about the South Beach Smokeelectronic cigarette and there have been quite a few changes since then. I think the changes were made around about the New Year, so if you bought a South Beach E cig between the New Year and now, you already know all of this. The guys at South Beach have been listening to what the users have been saying and have made some changes to meet their demands. If you haven’t read my original South Beach Smoke review then I would recommend it, things have changed since then but others haven’t, so it’s a good starting point.

If you have read my original review you will know there were a few things that needed a bit of attention. There wasn’t anything terribly wrong with the original, it just needed a few tweaks, I guess. Two things I really wanted to see were better throat hit and more vapor production. I can tell you this, the vapor that the South Beach Smoke gives off now is great! It is many times better than it was before, when it was decent. I’m not saying that it is the best on the market, it is still a little behind V2 Cigs, but its not far from it, very close in fact. It’s nice to be surrounded by vapor when taking a drag, it makes me feel at home.

Throat hit hasn’t really been improved too much, I’m using 16mg cartridges just now and hit is minimal. 16mg is pretty strong (the strongest South Beach offer in fact) so I would expect a strong throat hit to go along with that, but this isn’t the case. This still needs a bit of work.

Costs

Another issue I had was with the cost of refill cartridges. To get the cheapest refills you would have had to join up to their Home Delivery Program, if you didn’t join up you had to pay an arm and a leg for a refill, well, $5. But that is more than all of the other big E cigarette brands. Thankfully they have seen sense and now offer refills at a much more sensible, reasonable price. A pack of 15 refills will cost you $39.99, that’s $2.67 each. Keep in mind that a single cartridge will give you the same smoking time as about 30 tobacco cigarettes, that makes these very good value for money now.

The South Beach Home Delivery Program is still available though, if you join up you get refills automatically sent out to your home each month or so, saving you from re-ordering all the time. And you still get a 20% discount for signing up. If you like the South Beach product and want to keep on using it then this is something you should give some serious thought to. It’s well worth it.

The price of their basic “Deluxe Starter Kit” has been brought down too. Previously it cost a whopping $99.99 (unless you joined the Home Delivery Program, which got you the kit for $49.99). $99.99 was far too much for what you got in your E cigarette starter kit, so thankfully they have seen the light again. They now just have a single price for their starter kits, these start at $59.99.

Flavors

The final problem I had with the old package was that there wasn’t many flavors to choose from. In particular, they only offered one tobacco flavor. There are many tobacco cigarettes on the market, all of which taste different, so everyone will look for a different thing in their tobacco flavor, so a wider choice was needed. Thankfully South Beach have new flavors coming out soon, these are peppermint, pina colada, peach and two new tobacco flavors, tobacco blue and tobacco gold. I’ve not tried these, so I’ve no idea how they’ll taste, but they sound promising.

Overall the South Beach Smoke has been improved massively. In terms of smoking experience and value for money. The vapor given off is fantastic and the flavors are really good too, I’m looking forward to the new flavors, they should make the South Beach stand out a little from the competition. And the new starter kit prices are much better. For me, the South Beach is one of the top devices on the market and if you are looking for a new electronic cigarette then you need to give these guys some serious consideration.